Tag Archives: digital strategy

In my last post I described a set of analytics projects that drive real competitive advantage in retail and eCommerce. These projects are meant to be the opening of the third and final stage of an analytically driven digital transformation. They are big, complex, important projects that make a real difference to the way the business works.

But I know folks outside retail (and they’re the majority of my client-base) get frustrated because so much of the analytics technology and conversation seems to reflect retail concerns. So in this post, I wanted to describe an alternative set of projects specifically for another industry (I picked Hospitality) and talk a little bit about some of the key analytics flashpoints in different industries. Every business is unique. There is no one right set of projects when you get to this phase of digital transformation, but there are analytics projects that are quite important to almost everyone in a given industry.

Here’s a fairly generic set of projects I’d typically attach to a presentation on digital transformation in hospitality. You can see that about half the projects are the same as what I recommended for retail.

Aggressive personalization is a core part of MOST good digital programs – almost regardless of industry. If you’re in health-care, financial services, retail, travel & hospitality, government or technology, then analytics-driven personalization should be a high priority. It’s actually a lot easier to say where personalization might not be near the top of the list: CPG and maybe manufacturing. In CPG, many web sites are too shallow and lack enough interesting content to make personalization effective. In fact, the Website itself is often pretty unimportant. CPG folks should probably be more worried about their marketing and social media analytics than personalization. Manufacturers might be on the same level, but a lot depends on the type of industry, how many products you have, how many audiences, and how much content. In every case, the more you have (product, audience, content), the more likely it is that personalization should be a strategic priority.

I also included Surprise-based Loyalty. Travel is actually the sector where I first developed these concepts. You can read a somewhat more detailed explanation in an article I recently published in the CIO Outlook for Travel & Hospitality. But there are quite a few reasons why hospitality, in particular, is a great place to build a surprise-based program. First, the hospitality industry has numerous opportunities to deliver surprise-based loyalty at little or no cost. That’s critical. Hospitality also has the requisite data to allow for powerful analytic targeting and has sufficient touches to make the concept powerful and workable. What’s more, most of the rewards programs in hospitality suffer from scale. Sure, a few global giants have the reach to make a traditional loyalty program appealing. But if you’re a boutique or mid-tier chain, your traditional loyalty program will never look particularly attractive. Surprise-based concepts get around all that. With no fixed cost, the ability to target and grow them organically, and real impact on loyalty, they deliver a fundamentally different kind of experience that doesn’t depend on scale and global reach.

My third project is another one that could appear almost everywhere: mobile optimization. For Hospitality, it’s particularly important to create a great mobile on-property experience and build out the mobile experience as the Hub for loyalty. Integration of mobile digital experiences with property systems enables a whole array of real experience difference makers – room selection, automatic upgrading, room bidding, expedited check-in, door control, service requests and, of course, plenty of surprise (and traditional) loyalty opportunities.

Why didn’t this show up in retail? Hey, it could. It might be sixth on my generic list. But many of the retailers I’m working with are struggling to figure out how to make mobile an important part of the experience. With all the beaconing and wifi we’ve seen, most opt-in systems simply don’t get enough adoption to make them worthwhile. I think it’s easier to drive adoption in hospitality. And adoption is critical to driving serious advantage.

When I talk about advanced Revenue Management I’m clearly hovering somewhere on the edge of what might reasonably be considered digital. There are lots of different ways to improve revenue management, but what I have in mind here are two specific types of analysis. The first is using digital view volume to feed demand signals into revenue management. This is a simple but effective technique for taking advantage of your digital data to improve your price planning. I also believe that in the zero-sum game that is room (and flight) planning, there are opportunities to use digital data collection from OTAs to reverse engineer competitor pricing strategies and then optimize your price curve to take advantage of that knowledge.

In retail, I talked about the growing importance of electronic signage and integrated digital experiences and optimizing the measurement of those (largely unmeasured) systems. In Hospitality, I’ve picked something that isn’t quite the same but falls in the same omni-channel category – optimizing the integration of on-property with digital. This cuts in both directions and overlaps with the analytics around mobile (obviously), personalization (obviously), surprise-loyalty (obviously) and revenue management. Revenue Management a little less obviously but most revenue management systems use time-based pricing not customer based pricing – often completely missing differentials in customer value from on-property behavior. Casino’s, of course, are the exception to this.

For resort properties, there are significant opportunities to integrate digital view behavior into on-property drives. But for almost every type of property there are ways to make the on-property experience better. Some of this is ridiculously easy. When I log into my hotel wifi, I almost always get the standard property page. No customization. No personalization. But I’m a heavy consumer of certain types of on-property experiences including some highly-profitable ones like late-night room service dinners. Do I ever get a dinner drive? A special offer? A loyalty treat? Nope. Pretty much never.

I put this digital/on-property integration high on the list mostly because when it comes to hospitality, the on-property experience is THE critical factor. I might love or hate the Website or even the App, but both are just little bumps on the great big behind that is the actual stay. If I can help make the stay experience better with digital, I’ve done something important.

So my top five projects for hospitality are:

Personalization

Surprise-based Loyalty

Digital Additions to Revenue Management

Mobile Experience and Loyalty Optimization

On-Property digital integration

As with retail, none are easy. Most involve complex integrations AND deep analytics to work well. But they form a powerful and powerfully related nexus of programs that drive real competitive advantage.

Of course, as I’ve tried to make clear, the selection of a top-five is utterly arbitrary. Every business will have its unique strategic priorities, market position, and brand. Those things matter. What’s more, the third phase of an analytics transformation is open-ended. There aren’t just five things. You don’t stop when (if ever) you’ve done these projects.

So it’s natural to ask what are some other commonly important projects that didn’t make the list (and weren’t already captured in the earlier two phases). Here, with some notes about industries, are some more things to chew on:

Digital Acquisition Optimization (Campaign-level): I’ve already covered both a campaign measurement framework and Mix/Attribution in the first two phases. But I haven’t been quite true to myself since I often tell clients to worry about optimizing your individual channels and campaigns first before you worry about attribution. There are more powerful analytic techniques for campaign-specific optimization than attribution – and many, many enterprises would be well-advised focus on those techniques as part of their overall digital transformation. I won’t say that every digital media buy I see sucks. But a lot do. This one isn’t specific to industry; it’s important to anyone dropping significant dime on digital marketing.

Right-Channeling Support: This analytics project often makes my top-five list in financial services, technology, and health care (but it’s important in a lot of other places too). Not only is the call-center a significant cost for many an enterprise, it’s almost always a significant driver of churn and bad experience. That’s not always because call-centers are bad – it’s hard to do well. And these days, many people (I’m certainly in this bucket) flat out prefer digital servicing in most use-cases. So digital servicing is a big deal and it’s deeply analytic. Bridging digital and call is a huge analytics opportunity and one of the most important projects you can take in a digital transformation.

Digital Sales Support: If a field-sales force is a core part of your business, then digital analytics to support what they do is often in my top-five projects around transformation. Technology, Pharma, and certain areas of Financial Services (like Insurance and Wealth) all need to figure out how their digital assets play with their field sales force. Siloed approaches here are worse than silos in digital marketing attribution. You can NOT do this well unless you tackle it as an integrated effort with consistent measurement across the journey.

Content Attribution: When I was at the Digital Analytics Hub in Europe one of the most interesting parts of the discussion around transformation focused on the need for traditional companies to become, in effect, media companies. There’s nothing terribly original about this idea (not sure who’s it is), but it is terribly important and often it’s a huge stumbling block when it comes to transformation. Companies don’t build nearly enough content to be good at digital and they don’t measure it appropriately. Learning how to measure the content experience and how to take advantage of content are keys to effective digital transformation and anyone focused on building deeper sales cycles should think carefully about making content attribution a prominent part of their initial analytics plan.

Balancing Success: One of the biggest failure points in digital transformation in my client-base involves situations where a digital property has several very important enterprise functions. Selling and generating leads, advertising and engagement, linear vs. direct consumption, building brands vs. generating revenue. These are all common examples. The problem is that most enterprises are wishy-washy when it comes to balancing these objectives. When I ask senior folks what they really want (or when I look at how people are measured), what I usually hear is both. That’s not helpful. There are analytic approaches to measuring the trade-offs in site real-estate and marketing between driving to multiple types of success. If you haven’t done the analytics work to figure this out and set appropriate incentives and performance measurements, you’re simply not going to be good at all – and perhaps any – of your core functions.

Well, I could go on of course. But I’m almost at four pages now – which I know is excessive. There are a lot of options. That’s why creating a strategic plan for analytics transformation isn’t trivial and it isn’t boilerplate. But as I pointed out in my introduction to the last post, this is the fun stuff.

In my next post, I hope to tackle those organizational issues I’ve been deferring for so long – but I may have one or two more detours up my sleeve!

I spent most of the last week at the fourth annual Digital Analytics Hub Conference outside London, talking analytics. And talking. And talking. And while I love talking analytics, thank heavens I had a few opportunities to get away from the sound of my own voice and enjoy the rather more pleasing absence of sounds in the English countryside.

With X Change no more, the Hub is the best conference going these days in digital analytics (full disclosure – the guys who run it are old friends of mine). It’s an immensely enjoyable opportunity to talk in-depth with serious practitioners about everything from cutting edge analytics to digital transformation to traditional digital analytics concerns around marketing analytics. Some of the biggest, best and most interesting brands in Europe were there: from digital and bricks-and-mortar behemoths to cutting-edge digital pure-plays to a pretty good sampling of the biggest consultancies in and out of the digital world.

As has been true in previous visits, I found the overall state of digital analytics in Europe to be a bit behind the U.S. – especially in terms of team-size and perhaps in data integration. But the leading companies in Europe are as good as anybody.

Here’s a sampling from my conversations:

Machine Learning

I’ve been pushing my team to grow in the machine learning space using libraries like TensorFlow to explore deep learning and see if it has potential for digital. It hasn’t been simple or easy. I’m thinking that people who talk as if you can drop a digital data set into a deep learning system and have magic happen have either:

Never tried it

Been trying to sell it

We’ve been having a hard time getting deep learning systems to out-perform techniques like Random Forests. We have a lot of theories about why that is, including problem selection, certain challenges with our data sets, and the ways we’ve chosen to structure our input. I had some great discussions with hardcore data scientists (and some very bright hacker analysts more in my mold) that gave me some fresh ideas. That’s lucky because I’m presenting some of this work at the upcoming eMetrics in Chicago and I want to have more impressive results to share. I’ve long insisted on the importance of structure to digital analytics and deep learning systems should be able to do a better job parsing that structure into the analysis than tools like random forests. So I’m still hopeful/semi-confident I can get better results.

In broader group discussion, one of the most controversial and interesting discussions focused on the pros-and-cons of black-box learning systems. I was a little surprised that most of the data scientist types were fairly negative on black-box techniques. I have my reservations about them and I see that organizations are often deeply distrustful of analytic results that can’t be transparently explained or which are hidden by a vendor. I get that. But opacity and performance aren’t incompatible. Just try to get an explanation of Google’s AlphaGo! If you can test a system carefully, how important is model transparency?

So what are my reservations? I’m less concerned about the black-boxness of a technique than I am its completeness. When it comes to things like recommendation engines, I think enterprise analysts should be able to consistently beat a turnkey blackbox (or not blackbox) system with appropriate local customization of the inputs and model. But I harbor no bias here. From my perspective it’s useful but not critical to understand the insides of a model provided we’ve been careful testing to make sure that it actually works!

Another huge discussion topic and one that I more in accord with was around the importance of not over-focusing on a single technique. Not only are there many varieties of machine learning – each with some advantages to specific problem types – but there are powerful analytic techniques outside the sphere of machine learning that are used in other disciplines and are completely untried in digital analytics. We have so much to learn and I only wish I had more time with a couple of the folks there to…talk!

New Technology

One of the innovations this year at the Hub was a New Technology Showcase. The showcase was kind of like spending a day with a Silicon Valley VC and getting presentations from the technology companies in their portfolio (which is a darn interesting way to spend a day). I didn’t know most of the companies that presented but there were a couple (Piwik and Snowplow) I’ve heard of. Snowplow, in particular, is a company that’s worth checking out. The Snowplow proposition is pretty simple. Digital data collection should be de-coupled from analysis. You’ve heard that before, right? It’s called Tag Management. But that’s not what Snowplow has in mind at all. They built a very sophisticated open-source data collection stack that’s highly performant and feeds directly into the cloud. The basic collection strategy is simple and modern. You send json objects that pass a schema reference along with the data. The schema references are versioned and updates are handled automatically for both backwardly compatible and incompatible updates. You can pass a full range of strongly-typed data and you can create cross-object contexts for things like visitors. Snowplow has built a whole bunch of simple templates to make it easier for folks used to traditional tagging to create the necessary calls. But you can pass anything to Snowplow – not just Web data. It’s very adaptable for mobile (far more so than traditional digital analytics systems) and really for any kind of data at all. Snowplow supports both real-time and batch – it’s a true lambda architecture. It seems to do a huge amount of the heavy lifting for you when it comes to creating a modern cloud-based data collection system. And did I mention it’s open-source? Free is a pretty good price. If you’re looking for an independent data collection architecture and are okay with the cloud, you really should give it a look.

Cloud vs. On-Premise

DA Hub’s keynote featured a panel with analytics leaders from companies like Intel, ASOS and the Financial Times. Every participant was running analytics in the cloud (with both AWS and Azure represented though AWS had an unsurprising majority). Except for barriers around InfoSec, it’s unclear to me why ANY company wouldn’t be in the cloud for their analytics.

Rolling your own Technology

We are not sheep

Here in the States, there’s been widespread adoption of open-source data technologies (Hadoop/Spark) to process and analyze digital data. But while I do see companies that have completely abandoned traditional SaaS analytics tools, it’s pretty rare. Mostly, the companies I see run both a SaaS solution to collect data and (perhaps) satisfy basic reporting needs as well as an open-source data platform. There was more interest in the people I talked to in the EU about a complete swap out including data collection and reporting. I even talked to folks who roll most of the visualization stack themselves with open-source solutions like D3. There are places where D3 is appropriate (you need complete customization of the surrounding interface, for example, or you need widespread but very inexpensive distribution), but I’m very far from convinced that rolling your own visualization solutions with open-source is the way to go. I would have said that same thing about data collection but…see above.

Digital Transformation

I had an exhilarating discussion group centered around digital transformation. There were a ton of heavy hitters in the room – huge enterprises deep into projects of digital transformation, major consultancies, and some legendary industry vets. It was one of the most enjoyable conference experiences I’ve ever had. I swear that we (most of us anyway) could have gone on another 2 hours or more – since we just scratched the surface of the problems. My plan for the session was to cover what defines excellence in digital (what do you have to be able to do digital well), then tackle how a large-enterprise that wants to transform in digital needs to organize itself. Finally, I wanted to cover the change management and process necessary to get from here to there. If you’re reading this post that should sound familiar!

It’s a long path

Well, we didn’t get to the third item and we didn’t finish the second. That’s no disgrace. These are big topics. But the discussion helped clarify my thinking – especially around organization and the very real challenges in scaling a startup model into something that works for a large enterprise. Much of the blending of teams and capabilities that I’ve been recommending in these posts on digital transformation are lessons I’ve gleaned from seeing digital pure-plays and how they work. But I’ve always been uncomfortably aware that the process of scaling into larger teams creates issues around corporate communications, reporting structures, and career paths that I’m not even close to solving. Not only did this discussion clarify and advance my thinking on the topic, I’m fairly confident that it was of equal service to everyone else. I really wish that same group could have spent the whole day together. A big THANKS to everyone there, you were fantastic!

I plan to write more on this in a subsequent post. And I may drop another post on Hub learnings after I peruse my notes. I’ve only hit on the big stuff – and there were a lot of smaller takeaways worth noting.

See you there!

As I mentioned in my last post, the guys who run DA Hub are bringing it to Monterey, CA (first time in the U.S.) this September. Do check it out. It’s worth the trip (and the venue is pretty special). I think I’m on the hook to reprise that session on digital transformation. And yes, that scares me…you don’t often catch lightning in a bottle twice.

I’m writing this post as I fly to London for the Digital Analytics Hub. The Hub is in its fourth year now (two in Berlin and two in London) and I’ve managed to make it every time. Of course, doing these Conference/Vacations is a bit of a mixed blessing. I really enjoyed my time in Italy but that was more vacation than Conference. The Hub is more Conference than vacation – it’s filled with Europe’s top analytics practitioners in deep conversation on analytics. In fact, it’s my favorite analytics conference going right now. And here’s the good news, it’s coming to the States in September! So I have one more of these analytics vacations on my calendar and that should be the best one of all. If you’re looking for the ultimate analytics experience – an immersion in deep conversation with the some of the best analytics practitioners around – you should check it out.

In my last post, I described five initiatives that lay the foundation for analytics driven digital transformation. Those projects focus on data collection, journey mapping, behavioral segmentation, enterprise Voice of Customer (VoC) and unified marketing measurement. Together, these five initiatives provide a way to think about digital from a customer perspective. The data piece is focused on making sure that data collection to support personalization and segmentation is in place. The Journey mapping and the behavioral segmentation provide the customer context for every digital touchpoint – why it exists and what it’s supposed to do. The VoC system provides a window into who customers want and need and how they make decisions at every touchpoint. Finally, the marketing framework ensures that digital spend is optimized on an apples-to-apples basis and is focused on the right customers and actions to drive the business.

In a way, these projects are all designed to help the enterprise think and talk intelligently about the digital business. The data collection piece is designed to get organizations thinking about personalization cues in the digital experience. Journey mapping is designed to expand and frame customer experience and place customer thinking at the center of the digital strategy. Two-tiered segmentation serves to get people talking about digital success in terms of customer’s and their intent. Instead of asking questions like whether a Website is successful, it gets people thinking about whether the Website is successful for a certain type of customer with a specific journey intent. That’s a much better way to think. Similarly, the VoC system is all about getting people to focus on customer and to realize that analytics can serve decision-making on an ongoing basis. The marketing framework is all about making sure that campaigns and creative are measured to real business goals – set within the customer journey and the behavioral segmentation.

The foundational elements are also designed to help integrate analytics into different parts of the digital business. The data collection piece is targeted toward direct response optimization. Journey mapping is designed to help weld strategic decisions to line manager responsibilities. Behavioral segmentation is focused on line and product managers needing tactical experience optimization. VoC is targeted toward strategic thinking and decision-making, and, of course, the marketing framework is designed to support the campaign and creative teams.

If a way to think and talk intelligently about the digital enterprise and its operations is the first step, what comes next?

All five of the initiatives that I’ve slated into the next phase are about one thing – creating a discipline of continuous improvement in the enterprise. That discipline can’t be built on top of thin air – it only works if your foundation (data, metrics, framework) supports optimization. Once it does, however, the focus should be on taking advantage of that to create continuous improvement.

The first step is massive experimentation via an analytics driven testing plan. This is partly about doing lots of experiments, yes. But even more important is that the experimentation be done as part of an overall optimization plan with tests targeted by behavioral and VoC analytics to specific experiences where the opportunity for improvement is highest. If all you’re thinking about is how many experiments you run, you’re not doing it right. Every type of customer and every part of their journey should have tests targeted toward its improvement.

Similarly on the marketing side, phase II is about optimizing against the unified measurement framework with both mix and control group testing. Mix is a top-down approach that works against your overall spending – regardless of channel type or individual measurement. Control group testing is nothing more than experimentation in the marketing world. Control groups have been a key part of marketing since the early direct response days. They’re easier to implement and more accurate in establishing true lift and incrementality than mathematical attribution solutions.

The drive toward continuous improvement doesn’t end there, however. I’m a big fan for tool-based reporting as a key part of the second phase of analytics driven transformation. The idea behind tool-based reporting is simple but profound. Instead of reports as static, historical tools to describe what happened, the idea is that reports contain embedded predictive models that transform them into tools that can be used to understand the levers of the business and test what might happen based on different business strategies. Building tool-based reports for marketing, for product launch, for conversion funnels and for other key digital systems is deeply transformative. I describe this as shift in the organization from democratizing data to democratizing knowledge. Knowledge is better. But the advantages to tool-based reporting run even deeper. The models embedded in these reports are your best analytic thinking about how the business works. And guess what? They’ll be wrong a lot of the time and that’s a good thing. It’s a good thing because by making analytically thinking about how the business works explicit, you’ve created feedback mechanisms in the organization. When things don’t work out the way the model predicts, your analysts will hear about it and have to figure out why and how to do better. That drives continuous improvement in analytics.

A fourth key part of creating the agile enterprise – at least for sites without direct ecommerce – is value-based optimization. One of the great sins in digital measurement is leaving gaps in your ability to measure customers across their journey. I call this “closing measurement loops”. If you’re digital properties are lead generating or brand focused or informational or designed to drive off-channel or off-property (to Amazon or to a Call-Center), it’s much harder to measure whether or not they’re successful. You can measure proxies like content consumption or site satisfaction, but unless these proxies actually track to real outcomes, you’re just fooling yourself. This is important. To be good at digital and to use measurement effectively, every important measurement gap needs to be closed. There’s no one tool or method for closing measurement gaps, instead, a whole lot of different techniques with a bunch of sweat is required. Some of the most common methods for closing measurement gaps include re-survey, panels, device binding and dynamic 800 numbers.

Lastly, a key part of this whole phase is training the organization to think in terms of continuous improvement. That doesn’t happen magically and while all of the initiatives described here support that transformation, they aren’t, by themselves, enough. In my two posts on building analytics culture, I laid out a fairly straightforward vision of culture. The basic idea is that you build analytics culture my using data and analytics. Not by talking about how important data is or how people should behave. In the beginning was the deed.

Creating a constant cadence of analytics-based briefings and discussions forces the organization to think analytically. It forces analysts to understand the questions that are meaningful to the business. It forces decision-makers to reckon with data and lets them experience the power of being able to ask questions and get real answers. Just the imperative of having to say something interesting is good discipline for driving continuous improvement.

That’s phase two of enterprise digital transformation. It’s all about baking continuous improvement into the organization and building on top of each element of the foundation the never ending process of getting better.

You might think that’s pretty much all there is to the analytics side of the digital transformation equation. Not so. In my next post, I’ll cover the next phase of analytics transformation – driving big analytics wins. So far, most of what I’ve covered is valid for any enterprise in any industry. But in the next phase, initiatives tend to be quite different depending on your industry and business model.

For most of this year I’ve been writing an extended series on digital transformation in the enterprise. Along the way, I’ve described why organizations (particularly large ones) struggle with digital, the core capabilities necessary to do digital well, and ways in which organizations can build a better, more analytic culture. I’ve even put together a series of videos that describe how enterprises are currently driving digital and how they can do better.

I think both the current-state (what we do wrong) and the end-state (doing digital right) are compelling. In the next few posts, I’m going to wrap this series up with a discussion around how you get from here to there.

I don’t suppose anyone thinks the journey from here to there is trivial. Doing digital the way I’ve described it (see the Agile Organization) involves some pretty fundamental change: change to the way enterprises budget, change to the way they organize, and change to the way they do digital at almost every level. It also involves, and this is totally unsurprising, investments in people and technology and more than a dollop of patience. It would actually be much easier to build a good digital organization from scratch than to adapt the pieces that exist in the typical enterprise.

Change is harder than creation. It has more friction and more fail points. But change is the reality for most enterprise.

So where do you start and how do you go about building a great digital organization?

I’m going to answer that question here from an analytics perspective. That’s the easy part. Once I’ve worked through the steps in building analytics maturity and digital decisioning, I’ll tackle the organizational component, wherein I expect to hazard a series of guesses, speculation and unlikely theory to paper over the fact that almost no one has done this transformation successfully and every organization has fundamentally unique structures and people that make its dynamics deeply specific.

The foundation of any analytics program is, of course, data. One of the most satisfying developments in digital analytics in the past 3-5 years has been the dramatic improvement in the state of data collection. It used to be that EVERY engagement we undertook began with a plodding slog through data auditing and clean-up. These days, that’s more the exception than the rule. Still, there are plenty of exceptions. So the first step in just about any analytics effort is to make sure the data foundation is solid. There’s a second aspect to this that’s worth pointing out. For a lot of my clients, basic data collection is no longer much of an issue. But even where that’s true, there are often significant gaps in digital analytics data collection for personalization. So many Adobe designs are predicated on meeting reporting requirements that it’s not at all unusual for key personalization elements like filtering selections, image expansions, sorting behaviors and DHTML exposures to go largely untracked. That’s true on both the Web and Mobile sides. Part of auditing your data collection should be a careful look at whether your capturing all the personalization cues you could – and that’s often a critical foundational element for the steps to follow.

Right along with auditing your data collection comes building a comprehensive customer journey framework. I’ve added the word “framework” here not to be all “consulty” but to emphasize that a customer journey isn’t built once as a static map. That’s the old way – and it’s wrong in every respect (so be careful what you buy). It’s wrong because it’s not segmented. It’s wrong because it’s too high-level. And most of all it’s wrong because it’s too static. So while a customer journey framework is more a capability and a process than a “thing”, it’s also true that you have to start somewhere. Getting that initial segmented journey map in place provides the high-level strategic framework for your digital strategy and for your analytics and testing. It’s the key strategic piece welding your operational capabilities to your strategic vision.

My third foundational building block is (Chorus sings refrain) “2-Tiered segmentation”. I’ve written voluminously on digital segmentation and how it works, so I won’t add much more here. But if journey mapping is the piece linking your strategic vision to your operational capabilities, 2-tiered segmentation is the equivalent piece linking at the tactical level. At every touchpoint in a customer journey there is the need to understand who somebody is and where in their journey they are. That’s what 2-tiered segmentation provides.

Auditing your data, creating a journey mapping and tying that to a digital segmentation are truly foundational. They are all “you can’t get there from here without going through these” kind of activities. Almost every significant report, analysis and decision that you make will rely on these three activities.

That’s not really true for my next two foundational activities. I chose building an integrated voice of customer (VoC) capability as my fourth key building block. If you’ve read my book, you know that one of the main uses for a VoC program is to refine and tune your journey map and segmentation. So in one sense, this capability may be prior to either of those. But you can do enough VoC to support those two activities without really building a full VoC program. And what I have in mind here is a full program. What do I mean by a full program? I mean an enterprise feedback management system that makes it easy to deploy surveys at any point in the journey across any device. I mean a set of organizational processes that ideate, design, deploy, interpret and socialize VoC information constantly. I mean an enterprise-wide reporting capability that integrates different VoC sources, classifies them, tracks them, and provides drill-down (and that’s important because VoC data is virtually useless without cross-tabulation) access to them across the organization. I also mean a culture where one of the natural and immediate parts of making a decision is looking at what customer’s think and – if that isn’t available – launching a survey to figure it out. I put VoC as part of this foundational set because I think it’s one of the easiest ways to deliver real wins to the organization. I also like the idea of driving a combination of tactical (data, segmentation) and strategic (journey, VoC) initiatives in your early phases. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, we analytics folks tend to over-focus on the tactical.

Finally, I’ve included building a campaign measurement framework into the initial set of foundational activities. This might not be the right choice for every organization, but if you spend a significant amount of money on marketing, it’s a critical element in evolving your maturity. Like data audits, a lot of my clients are already pretty good at this. For many folks, campaigns are already measured using a pretty rich and well-thought out framework and the pain point tends to be deeper – around attribution and mix. But I also see organizations jumping right to questions of attribution before they’ve really done the work necessary to pick the right KPIs to optimize against. That’s a prescription for disaster. If you don’t put in the intellectual sweat equity to understand how campaigns should be measured (and it’s often surprisingly complicated in real-world businesses where conversion rate is rarely the be-all-and-end-all of optimization), then your attribution modelling is doomed to fail.

So here’s the first five things to tackle in building out the analytics part of a digital transformation effort:

These five activities provide a rich foundation for analytics driven transformation along with some core strategic analytic capabilities. I’ll cover what comes after this in my next post.

A little while back there was a fascinating article on the lack of productivity growth in the U.S. in the past 4-5 years. I’ll try to summarize the key points below (and then tell you why I think they’re important) – but the full article is very much worth the read.

Let’s start with the facts. In the last year, the total number of hours worked in the U.S. rose by 1.9%. GDP growth in the last quarter exactly matched that rate – 1.9%. So we added hours and we got an exact match in output. That might sound okay, but it means that there was zero productivity growth. We didn’t get one whit more efficient in producing stuff. Nor is this just a short term blip. In the last four years, we’ve recorded .4% annual growth in productivity. That’s not very good. Take a look at the chart above (from the New York Times article and originally from the Labor Department) – it looks bad. We’re in late ‘70s and early ‘80s territory. Those weren’t good years.

The Times article advances three theories about why productivity growth has been so tepid. They classify them as the “Depressing” theory, the “Neutral” theory and the “Happy” theory. Here’s a quick description of each.

Depressing Theory

The trend is real and will be sustained. Capex is down. The digital revolution is largely complete. People aren’t getting significantly more productive and the people returning to the work-force post-recession are the least productive segment of our workforce. On this view, we’re not getting richer anytime soon.

Neutral Theory

There’s a lot of imprecision in measuring productivity. With fundamental changes in the economy it may be that the imprecision is increasing – and we’re undercounting true productivity. As measurement professionals, we all know this one needs to be reckoned with.

Happy Theory

We’re in an “investment” period where companies are hiring and investing – resulting in a period of lower-productivity before that investment begins to show returns and productivity accelerates. Interestingly, this story played out in the late ‘90s when productivity slowed and then accelerated sharply in the 2000s.

Which theory is right? The Times article doesn’t really draw any firm conclusions – and that’s probably reasonable. When it comes to macro-economic trends, the answers are rarely simple and obvious. From my perspective, though, this lack of productivity is troubling. We live in a profession (analytics) that’s supposed to be the next great driver or productivity. Computers, internet, now analytics. We’re on the hook for the next great advance in productivity. From a macro-economic perspective, no one’s thinking about analytics. But out here in the field, analytics is THE thing companies are investing in to drive productivity.

And the bad news? We’re clearly not delivering.

Now I don’t take it as all bad news. There’s a pretty good chance that the Happy theory is dead-on. Analytics is a difficult transformation and one that many companies struggle with. And while they’re struggling with big data systems and advanced analytics, you have a lot of money getting poured into rather unproductive holes. Word processing was almost certainly more immediately productive than analytics (anybody out there remember Wang?) – but every sea change in how we do things is going to take time, effort and money. Analytics takes more than most.

Here’s the flip side, though. It’s easy to see how all that investment in analytics might turn out to be as unproductive as building nuclear missiles and parking them into the ground. If they were ever used, those missiles would produce a pretty big bang for the buck. In the case of ICBM’s, we’re all happiest when they don’t get used. That’s not what we hope for from analytics.

Of course, I’ve been doing this extended series on the challenges of digital transformation – most of which revolves around why we aren’t more productive with analytics. Those challenges are not, in my opinion, the exception. They’re the rule. The vast majority of enterprises aren’t doing analytics well and aren’t boosting their productivity with it. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in the power of analytics to drive real productivity. I do. But before those productivity gains start to appear, we have to do better.

Doing better isn’t about one single thing. Heaven knows it’s not just about having the newest technologies. We have those aplenty. It’s about finding highly repeatable methods in analytics so that we can drive improvement without rock-stars. It’s very much about re-thinking the way the organization is setup so that analytics is embedded and operationalized. It’s even more about finding ways to re-tool our thinking so that agile concepts and controlled experimentation are everywhere.

Most companies still need a blueprint for how to turn analytics into increased productivity. That’s what this series on digital transformation is all about.

Since I finished Measuring the Digital World and got back to regular blogging, I’ve been writing an extended series on the challenges of digital in the enterprise. Like many analysts, I’m often frustrated by the way our clients approach decision-making. So often, they lack any real understanding of the customer journey, any effective segmentation scheme, any real method for either doing or incorporating analytics into their decisioning, anything more than a superficial understanding of their customers, and anything more than the empty façade of a testing program. Is it any surprise that they aren’t very good at digital? This would be frustrating but understandable if companies simply didn’t invest in these capabilities. They aren’t magic, and no large enterprise can do these things without making a significant investment. But, in fact, many companies have invested plenty with very disappointing results. That’s maddening. I want to change that – and this series is an extended meditation on what it takes to do better and how large enterprises might truly gain competitive advantage in digital.

I hope that reading these posts is useful to people, but I know, too, that it’s hard to get the time. Heaven knows I struggle to read the stuff I’d like to. So I took advantage of the slow time over the holidays to do something that’s been on my wish list for about 2 years now – take some of the presentations I do and turn them into full online webinars. I started with a whole series that captures the core elements of this series – the challenge of digital transformation.

There are two versions of this video series. The first is a set of fairly short (2-4 minute) stories that walk through how enterprise decision-making gets done, what’s wrong with the way we do it, and how we can do better. It’s a ten(!) part series and meant to be tackled in order. It’s not really all that long…like I said, most of the videos are just 2-4 minutes long. I’ve also packaged up the whole story (except Part 10) in single video that runs just a little over 20 minutes. It’s shorter than viewing all 10 of the others, but you need a decent chunk of uninterrupted time to get at it. If you’re really pressed and only want to get the key themes without the story, you can just view Parts 8-10.

Check it out and let me know what you think! To me it seems like a faster, better, and more enjoyable way to get the story about digital transformation and I’m hoping it’s very shareable as well. If you’re struggling to get analytics traction in your organization, these videos might be an easy thing to share with your CMO and digital channel leads to help drive real change.

I have to say I enjoyed doing these a lot and they aren’t really hard to do. They aren’t quite professional quality, but I think they are very listenable and I’ll keep working to make them better. In fact, I enjoyed doing the digital transformation ones so much that I knocked out another this last week – Big Data Explained.

This is one of my favorite presentations of all time – it’s rich in content and intellectually interesting. Big data is a subject that is obscured by hype, self-interest, and just plain ignorance; everyone talks about it but no one has a clear, cogent explanation of what it is and why it’s important. This presentation deconstructs the everyday explanation about big data (the 4Vs) and shows why it misses the mark. But it isn’t designed to merely expose the hype, it actually builds out a clear, straightforward and important explanation of why big data is real, why it challenges common IT and analytics paradigms, and how to understand whether a problem is a big data problem…or not. I’ve written about this before, but you can’t beat a video with supporting visuals for this particular topic. It’s less than fifteen minutes and, like the digital transformation series, it’s intended for a wide audience. If you have decision-makers who don’t get big data or are skeptical of the hype, they’ll appreciate this straightforward, clear, and no-nonsense explication of what it is.

This is also a significant topic toward the end of Measuring the Digital World where I try to lay out a forward looking plan for digital analytics as a discipline.

I’m planning to do a steady stream of these videos throughout the year so I’d love thoughts/feedback if you have suggestions!

Next week I hope to have an update on my EY Counseling Family’s work in the 538 Academy Awards challenge. We’ve built our initial Hollywood culture models – it’s pretty cool stuff and I’m excited to share the results. Our model may not be as effective as some of the other challengers (TBD), but I think it’s definitely more fun.

Building an analytics culture in the enterprise is incredibly important. It’s far more important than any single capability, technology or technique. But building culture isn’t easy. You can’t buy it. You can’t proclaim it. You can’t implement it.

There is, of course, a vast literature on building culture in the enterprise. But if the clumsy, heavy-handed, thoroughly useless attempts to “build culture” that I’ve witnessed over the course of my working life are any evidence, that body of literature is nearly useless.

Here’s one thing I know for sure: you don’t build culture by talk. I don’t care whether it’s getting teenagers to practice safe-sex or getting managers to use analytics, preaching virtue doesn’t work, has never worked and will never work. Telling people to be data-driven, proclaiming your commitment to analytics, touting your analytics capabilities: none of this builds analytics culture.

If there’s one thing that every young employee has learned in this era, it’s that fancy talk is cheap and meaningless. People are incredibly sophisticated about language these days. We can sit in front of the TV and recognize in a second whether we’re seeing a commercial or a program. Most of us can tell the difference between a TV show and movie almost at a glance. We can tune out advertising on a Website as effortlessly as we put on our pants. A bunch of glib words aren’t going to fool anyone. You want to know what the reaction is to your carefully crafted, strategic consultancy driven mission statement or that five year “vision” you spent millions on and just rolled out with a cool video at your Sales Conference? Complete indifference.

That’s if you’re lucky…if you didn’t do it really well, you got the eye-roll.

But it isn’t just that people are incredibly sensitive – probably too sensitive – to BS. It’s that even true, sincere, beautifully reasoned words will not build culture. Reading moral philosophy does not create moral students. Not because the words aren’t right or true, but because behaviors are, for the most part, not driven by those types of reasons.

That’s the whole thing about culture.

Culture is lived, not read or spoken. To create it, you have to ingrain it in people’s thinking. If you want a data-driven organization, you have to create good analytic habits. You have to make the organization (and you too) work right.

How do you do that?

You do it by creating certain kinds of process and behaviors that embed analytic thinking. Do enough of that, and you’ll have an analytic culture. I guarantee it. The whole thrust of this recent series of posts is that by changing the way you integrate analytics, voice-of-customer, journey-mapping and experimentation into the enterprise, you can drive better digital decision making. That’s building culture. It’s my big answer to the question of how you build analytics culture.

But I have some small answers as well. Here, in no particular order, are practical ways you can create importantly good analytics habits in the enterprise.

Analytic Reporting

What it is: Changing your enterprise reporting strategy by moving from reports to tools. Analytic models and forecasting allow you to build tools that integrate historical reporting with forecasting and what-if capabilities. Static reporting is replaced by a set of interactive tools that allow users to see how different business strategies actually play-out.

Why it build analytics culture: With analytics reporting, you democratize knowledge not data. It makes all the difference in the world. The analytic models capture your best insight into how a key business works and what levers drive performance. Building this into tools not only operationalizes the knowledge, it creates positive feedback loops to analytics. When the forecast isn’t right, everyone know it and the business is incented to improve its understanding and predictive capabilities. This makes for better culture in analytics consumers and analytics producers.

Cadence of Communications

What it is: Setting up regular briefings between analytics and your senior team and decision-makers. This can include review of dashboards but should primarily focus on answers to previous business questions and discussion of new problems.

Why it builds analytics culture: This is actually one of the most important things you can do. It exposes decision-makers to analytics. It makes it easy for decision-makers to ask for new research and exposes them to the relevant techniques. Perhaps even more important, it lets decision-makers drive the analytics agenda, exposes analysts to real business problems, and forces analysts to develop better communication skills.

C-Suite Advisor

What it is: Create an Analytics Minister-without-portfolio whose sole job is to advise senior decision-makers on how to use, understand and evaluate the analytics, the data and the decisions they get.

Why it builds analytics culture: Most senior executives are fairly ignorant of the pitfalls in data interpretation and the ins-and-outs of KPIs and experimentation. You can’t send them back to get a modern MBA, but you can give them a trusted advisor with no axe to grind. This not only raises their analytics intelligence, it forces everyone feeding them information to up their game as well. This tactic is also critical because of the next strategy…

Walking the Walk

What it is: Senior Leaders can talk tell they are blue in the face about data-driven decision-making. Nobody will care. But let a Senior Leader even once use data or demand data around a decision they are making and the whole organization will take notice.

Why it builds analytics culture: Senior leaders CAN and DO have a profound impact on culture but they do so by their behavior not their words. When the leaders at the top use and demand data for decisions, so will everyone else.

Tagging Standards

What it is: A clearly defined set of data collection specifications that ensure that every piece of content on every platform is appropriately tagged to collect a rich set of customer, content, and behavioral data.

Why it builds analytics culture: This ends the debate over whether tags and measurement are optional. They aren’t. This also, interestingly, makes measurement easier. Sometimes, people just need to be told what to do. This is like choosing which side of the road to drive on – it’s far more important that you have a standard that which side of the road you pick. Standards are necessary when an organization needs direction and coordination. Tagging is a perfect example.

CMS and Campaign Meta-Data

What it is: The definition of and governance around the creation of campaign and content meta-data. Every piece of content and every campaign element should have detailed, rich meta-data around the audience, tone, approach, contents, and every other element that can be tuned and analyzed.

Why it builds analytics culture: Not only is meta-data the key to digital analytics – providing the meaning that makes content consumption understandable, but rich meta-data definition guides useful thought. These are the categories people will think about when they analyze content and campaign performance. That’s as it should be and by providing these pre-built, populated categorizations, you’ll greatly facilitate good analytics thinking.

Rapid VoC

What it is: The technical and organizational capability to rapidly create, deploy and analyze surveys and other voice-of-customer research instruments.

Why it builds analytics culture: This is the best capability I know for training senior decision-makers to use research. It’s so cheap, so easy, so flexible and so understandable that decision-makers will quickly get spoiled. They’ll use it over and over and over. Well – that’s the point. Nothing builds analytics muscle like use and getting this type of capability deeply embedded in the way your senior team thinks and works will truly change the decision-making culture of the enterprise.

SPEED and Formal Continuous Improvement Cycles

What it is: The use of a formal methodology for digital improvement. SPEED provides a way to identify the best opportunities for digital improvement, the ways to tackle those opportunities, and the ability to measure the impact of any changes. It’s the equivalent of Six Sigma for digital.

Why it builds analytics culture: Formal methods make it vastly easier for everyone in the organization to understand how to get better. Methods also help define a set of processes that organizations can build their organization around. This makes it easier to grow and scale. For large enterprises, in particular, it’s no surprise that formal methodologies like Six Sigma have been so successful. They make key cultural precepts manifest and attach processes to them so that the organizational inertia is guided in positive directions.

Does this seem like an absurdly long list? In truth I’m only about half-way through. But this post is getting LONG. So I’m going to save the rest of my list for next week. Till then, here’s some final thoughts on creating an analytics culture.

The secret to building culture is this: everything you do builds culture. Some things build the wrong kind of culture. Some things the right kind. But you are never not building culture. So if you want to build the right culture to be good at digital and decision-making, there’s no magic elixir, no secret sauce. There is only the discipline of doing things right. Over and over.

That being said, not every action is equal. Some foods are empty of nutrition but empty, too, of harm. Others positively destroy your teeth or your waistline. Still others provide the right kind of fuel. The things I’ve described above are not just a random list of things done right, they are the small to medium things that, done right, have the biggest impacts I’ve seen on building a great digital and analytics culture. They are also targeted to places and decisions which, done poorly, will deeply damage your culture.

I’ll detail some more super-foods for analytics culture in my next post!

People have struggled with this (big) data provider model but Factual feels like it’s found a real (and valuable) niche. Would love to see more of this grow since external data is a huge miss in most big data systems.

Targeted VoC is a powerful (and totally neglected) tool for personalization. Facebook’s experience is entirely relevant to ANY content producer. I don’t know if I can take credit for this, but I suggested this to folks at Facebook a couple of years back!

An interesting discussion of the problems in identifying “likely” voters and the benefits of behavioral data integration. Food for thought in the enterprise world as well where the equivalent is often possible but rarely done.